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It is amazing what some libraries lend anymore. There is a library in Missouri that lends cake pans. I have seen some libraries lend power tools, guitars and more!

This is starting to sound like a science fiction story just waiting to be written.

I agree about curation. Since we're talking about science fiction now - which inevitably becomes science fact, in the not so distant future we will have desktop biological printers capable of "printing" a seed. Then libraries won't need to keep seed stores, they can just print any seed on demand if they have the DNA on file. Edit: Of course, that just means the e-resource vendors of the future will have another thing to try to license...

A Berkeley port of Scratch, a tool for teaching kids to program with puzzle piece like functions/operators/etc.

An article that makes some good points about copyright, namely that the information we need to access, repair, or modify equipment we own is often copyrighted in itself. Which means by virtue of copyright we are unable to access the service manuals, error codes, or diagnostic tools we need to do anything with a technological device. The author makes a point that while works of art may be restricted by we own a performance right to it, physical objects we own outright.

An interesting online tool that allows transcription of scanned images of manuscripts, working entirely online and copying line by line from the image. The software is open source but the primary instance is maintained by the Center for Digital Theology at SLU.

Help via chat isn't a service we've ever offered, but maybe we should. This product looks awesome and it integrates with UserVoice, skype, etc. Could be a stellar new tool.

Help via chat would be very cool!

This works amazingly well. The javascript we use to send text messages in the webpacs went from 8.5k to 4.3k. Also this works to combine multiple scripts and optimize them all together.

There is quite a bit of alarming data in what the project has gathered, and one of those pieces of information is that more than 148,000 of the sites surveyed are vulnerable to the BEAST attack, which was developed by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong and disclosed last year. Their attack uses what's known as a chosen-plaintext attack against the AES implementation in the TLS 1.0 protocol and enables them to use a custom tool they wrote to steal and decrypt supposedly secure HTTPS cookies. The attacker can then hijack the victim's secure SSL session with a site such as an e-commerce site or online banking site.

This is an awesome tool I saw at the Evergreen conference. I used it on the Merlin git repo which was cool to see but since everything is in a flat directory structure and it's mostly Jessica (and a little bit me) committing it's not nearly as cool as some of the videos from other projects.

A tagent from the seed lending library...how would one catalog this?

"When not in circulation, the dogs will be kept in a shared exercise area, where they most commonly play poker together." - Well played.

Lastly, Harvard is also lending dogs now at one of their libraries. This is one of several experiments in lending things other than books (everything from tools to people) but I still question the relevance:

Describes the use of analytics tools such as Inspectlet, ClickTale, userfly, and more; it includes a nice little comparison table of features. Particularly cool are the real time screenshots and heatmaps depicting page use.

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

"Everyone's buzzing about Pinterest, a new social media tool that connects people through the things they like-but for a growing number of users in classrooms and media centers, it's fast becoming a powerful resource where teachers and students share images, store lesson plans, read about current events, watch video clips, and collect their favorite apps."

A nice collection of information for those new to the concept of digital preservation, as well as some tools to get your institution started.

Cynthia Dudenhoffer wrote this article in College & Research Libraries News about using Pinterest as a library marketing tool.

Just used this today to make a diagram of our Evergreen system. It was exactly what I was looking for and it worked flawlessly. 

A major victory for Google where the scanning of books has been justified as fair use, however it curious much of the case hinged on the scanning being "transformative" in the sense of the scanned material being used as a finding aid rather than a tool to read books, even though many books are entirely available to be read online.

This sounds like a good choice, and makes me even more excited for what the DPLA could have in store.